Optical systems are increasingly being used for a variety applications such as communications between people and/or electrical devices. These networks often employ lasers as the source of the light signals that are processed by the network. The networks employ optical devices such as planar optical devices to process the light signals generated by the lasers. The optical devices often have one or more waveguides that must be accurately aligned with the lasers in order to achieve proper performance of the optical device. Acceptable horizontal alignment can often be achieved by aligning marks on the laser with marks on the optical devices, however, the quality of vertical alignment is often dependent on less accurate techniques such as etching. As a result, these is a need for improving alignment between lasers and optical devices.